Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002)

The late prominent film critic Roger Ebert called Gaspar Noé's Irréversible a 'movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable'. I can fully understand this, which is surely borne out by the number of hardened Cannes Festival viewers who walked out on it on the year of its release. This is certainly not 'entertainment', if what we mean by that is something which helps us to pass the time, something to enjoy, etc. No, this is gruelling, punishing cinema and the blurb on the back of my DVD says it will 'remain with [me] for all time'. I know this is true, and I am also convinced that this a great film, a very important one. What we see at the beginning – extreme (and apparently gratuitous) violence, indeed what we see in the middle, the infamous rape scene with its continuation by brutal battering of the supposedly same victim – is gradually unpicked by the past (in future revelations), and the viewer can see method in the madness.

The film is in fourteen sections, all in reverse cronological order: we start at the violent end and end at the peaceful beginning.  We begin with two men talking when we hear police sirens and we are then directed to Rectum, a gay S&M club where a stretcher carries out Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and the man we later know as his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), is arrested. Later, we discover that Marcus and Pierre had been looking for Le Tenia (Al Prestia), but they mistake him for Mick (Michel Gondoin) standing next to him. Marcus begins to attack him, Mick breaks his arm and attempts to rape him, and Pierre savagely beats Mick dead with a fire extinguisher. (There are over twenty blows, and the audience feels them all.)

We later (i.e. 'earlier') see Marcus and Pierre in a taxi looking for the Rectum club, and Marcus is in a vile violent mood. The taxi has been hi-jacked by them from its Chinese driver. Previously, Marcus had found a transsexual prostitute who knows Le Tenia, and, acting like a maniac, he threatens her with a piece of broken glass to get information from her.

Next we see Alex (Monica Bellucci) on a stretcher, Marcus and Pierre questioned by the cops, and Marcus and Pierre trying to find the man who raped and attacked her. Alex leaves a party, takes an underground pedestrian passage and is savagely anally raped and beaten into a coma by Le Tenia. Alex had left the party because of Marcus's use of drugs, alcohol and general obnoxiousness. Pierre was once in a relationship with Alex, although she left him for Marcus.

Alex had previously said that she might be pregnant by Marcus, who seems to like the possiblity: this is clearly a very loving relationship. Alex tests herself and is delighted to find out she's pregnant. We see Alex in a park reading J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, the film blurs into subjectless strobe, and a sign saying 'Le Temps détruit tout' ('Time Destroys Everything') appears, which is a message that appears at the beginning of the film: one very favourable review of this film said time doesn't destroy the memory of this film, and I know it won't. This is a masterpiece, love it or hate it.